Theism and Belief

I see this all the time in higher education. Liberals teach courses in the Old Testament and harshly criticize the Judeo-Christian tradition as steeped in racism and patriarchal oppression. They teach courses in the New Testament, which try to paint the Apostle Paul as a great defender of both the patriarchy and the institution of slavery. One of the professors on my campus teaches that Paul was a paranoid schizophrenic and, hence, cannot be trusted on any subject whatsoever.

Ultimately, these folks hope that they can convert people away from antiquated religions like Judaism and Christianity and towards newer, hipper religions like multi-culturalism and diversity.

Some are not honest about what they are doing. For example, Bart Ehrman of UNC-Chapel Hill says that he is a “happy agnostic.” But that is silly. No college professor (of religion, no less) would say “I don’t know whether there is a God and, by the way, I am blissful about my ignorance.”

Bart Ehrman writes wildly biased books attacking Christianity because the self-proclaimed agnostic actually wants to convert people to atheism. Other professors in the UNC system seem to be a little more honest about what they are trying to do.

A course called "Atheism and Unbelief" is now taught by Professor Herbert Berg here at UNC-Wilmington. His course uses the following 7 textbooks:

1) "The God Delusion," by Dawkins
2) "Varieties of Unbelief," by Gaskin
3) "Atheism: Philosophical Justification," by Martin
4) "Eight Theories of Religion," by Pals
5) "Atheism: Very Short Introduction," by Baggini
6) "Letter to a Christian Nation," by Harris
7) "God is not Great," by Hitchens

There can be little doubt about what professor Berg is doing here. He is using several highly inflammatory and completely unscholarly books to attack religious belief in general and Christianity in particular. And he’s doing so in order to convert people towards a worldview of atheism and unbelief.

But this is not the way it should be. Our school in recent years has banned the Christmas tree and then banned the phrase “Good Friday” from the university calendar. We even have professors who have banned “A.D.” and “B.C.” from use in term papers. And we even have one department chair who wants to ban a professor from calling himself a Christian in emails to his students!

What kind of education are we providing when professors are teaching courses aimed at indoctrination into atheism? And what are we to do about it?

I’ll tell you what I intend to do about it: I intend to start my own course called “Theism and Belief.” It will be geared towards converting students to my own religion of Christianity. And it will only use Christian-friendly books like “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist” by Geisler and Turek and “Mere Christianity” by Lewis.

The problem right now is not that atheists at my school are often using the classroom to convert people into their own religion of unbelief. Misery has always loved company.

The real problem is that many of these atheists have made a free choice to attack traditional Christian beliefs and simultaneously wish to erect a “partition of separation” to keep Christians from defending themselves.

That will all end when I decide to teach my course in “Theism and Belief.” I think a free and open marketplace of ideas really is the American way. And I can hardly wait to hear the reaction from my friends at People for the American Way!